clothes shopping time
One of the joys of raising children is that they need things, like clothes. Luckily, I have a wonderful daughter who isn’t the least bit interested in fashion or keeping up with her friends. This makes clothes shopping an easy and affordable experience.
A couple years ago, I stopped at my favorite thrift store to pick up some camp clothes for the daughter. These were clothes that I didn’t care what happened to them or if they ever came back from camp. Since we’re pretty frugal with most of our purchases, I didn’t want her taking her “normal” clothes to camp and getting them ruined or lost. I think I spent about $20 on shirts and shorts for the two week camp.
It turned out that she really liked a lot of those clothes and they quickly became part of her normal wardrobe. Suddenly, I realized that buying her clothes anywhere else made no sense whatsoever. So, we started shopping at thrift stores for pretty much all of her clothing needs. I love that I can pick up an entire season’s worth of clothes for about $30. I also love how flexible she is and the fact that she could care less where they come from or what they look like, for the most part. Plus, if you see the way she treats her clothes, you’d probably feel much better knowing that she crawling in the mud in a pair of $3 pants versus a pair of $30 pants.
So, today we’re heading down to our favorite thrift store shopping district to get some summer clothes that she’s been desperately needing. I’m really getting tired of seeing her running around in mid-nineties degree weather wearing flannel lined jeans (she swears she isn’t hot, but come on!). While I figure we’ll spend about $30 on clothes, maybe a little more if I get a few things, we’ll probably spend almost that much on lunch and gas as well. Unfortunately, there are no good thrift stores where we live and we’ll be making the partners commute to the stores that have proven time and again to be worth the drive. And, since we’ll be down by the partner during his lunch hour, we’ll stop in and dine with him too. A nice family lunch out on a weekday is a rare occurance these days since gas prices went up and we moved so far away from his work.